


Grindhouse

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Accidental Relationship, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Reality Show, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Happy Ending, Midlife Crisis, POV Draco Malfoy, Romance, culinary references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 15:41:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4630839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <br/>
  <i>He has four Michelin stars and a scathing sense of humor and perfect fucking cheekbones and he gets cast for the new season of </i>
  <i>
    <b>Pantry Wars </b>
  </i>
  <i>without too much difficulty.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>And then he meets Rose Weasley.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>The world starts to spin a little faster.</i>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grindhouse

* * *

 

It’s the butterfly effect.

Draco gets into a sniping, sugar-straw brittle argument with his dad about the shiny silver peacock emblem stamped on the front of their menus and before he knows it he’s tearing his apron off and shouting, _‘I quit!’_ as he pushes through the pristine diamond-paned doors of _The Manor_ and a week goes by and then a month and he’s signing another alimony check for Astoria and he’s taking half of Scorpius’s new fraternity to a hedge shop in the East Village to get fake IDs and he’s drinking strawberry mojitos with Greg and Pansy in the soulless faux-antique Restoration Hardware echo chamber that is his new living room and he hears Pansy sigh, ‘ _You’re having a midlife crisis, obviously,’_ like it’s the simplest problem she’s ever had to solve and he’s rolling his eyes and he’s turning on the television and he’s impulsively signing up to be a contestant on some stupid realityshow and he’s not used to choosing or wanting or thinking for himself but he still dreams about long slender fingers entwined in his sheets and a _nouveau-_ Americanfood truck parked in a tidy green corner of Bryant Park and a legacy that _isn’t_ a generational hand-me-down and it’s—

It’s like watching a lifetime’s worth of dominos collapse into the shape of a question mark.

 

* * *

 

He has four Michelin stars and a scathing sense of humor and perfect fucking cheekbones and he gets cast for the new season of _Pantry Wars_ without too much difficulty.

And then he meets Rose Weasley.

The world starts to spin a little faster.

 

* * *

 

 _‘You’re Draco Malfoy,’_ she says the night they move into the competition penthouse and he blinks and he bristles and he takes in the gleaming wave of copper-red hair curling down her back and the patronizing slant of her wide hazel eyes and she’s too young too pretty too _distractingly familiar_ and his palms are damp and there are alarms blaring with banshee-wail urgency inside of his head and he’s forcing himself to drawl, _‘You’re doing the introduction thing backwards, sweetheart,’_ before any of his thoughts can gain traction but it doesn’t end up mattering because she’s smirking at him like she hasn’t decided if she’s going to take him seriously or not just yet and her lips are soft and full and glossy with cotton-candy pink lipstick and he didn’t fucking _prepare_ for this.

 _‘Oh, you don’t like people telling you who you are?’_ she asks with a teasing lilt to her voice.

But there’s something _dangerous_ there, too, something that reminds him of the burnt yellow-orange sparks that fly when he sharpens his knives the wrong way and he shouldn’t be _interested_ in chasing and chasing and _chasing_ because he isn’t a mason jar and she isn’t a firefly but he still—he catches her searching playful _calculating_ gaze and he cocks an eyebrow in a wordless game of truth or dare and she huffs out a breathless sounding laugh that hits him right in the center of his chest and he feels the countdown to self-destruction thrum hum buzz like a sports car engine in the hollow space beneath his ribs—

_Three._

_Two._

_One._

 

* * *

 

The other contestants are exactly what Draco had expected.

Variations of low-level line cooks from vegan farm-to-table co-ops in Park Slope, freshly-promoted _sauciers_ down from Connecticut with their adopted French accents and boringly predictable reliance on compound herb butters, inexperienced culinary students still ravenously hungry for gold stars and validation from the shark-tooth mouths of their authority figures—and they’re a faceless mishmash of finite talent and clumsy knife skills and he’s left feeling abstractly grateful for the yawning team of paramedics loitering in the shadows of the Alphabet City warehouse kitchen because _there will be blood_ , indeed.

 

* * *

 

Their first challenge is a race to see who can shuck the most oysters in a flat five minutes and he finishes fourth on purpose.

He may not need the prize money and he may not really give a shit about the _Food & Wine_ editorial but he likes to win and he likes to brag _about_ winning and he’s smart enough to see the inherent value of being underestimated by his peers.

Except he’s so busy congratulating himself on a job well done that he almost misses Parvati Patil chirping, ‘ _Rose, it’s your turn to pick a partner,’_ and his blood goes hot and syrupy and _sweet_ like stovetop caramel when Rose Weasley flashes him a slyly conspiratorial grin from across the bank of stainless steel counters and says in a tone that’s as crisp and intoxicating and _treacherous_ as Snow White’s apple—

_‘Yeah, I’ll take Draco.’_

 

* * *

 

She isn’t shy.

She isn’t coy.

She’s loud and she’s outspoken and her teeth graze the tissue-thin shell of his ear when she teases him with, _‘I want to fuck you,’_ in the backseat of the late model Mercedes SUV they’re being shuttled around in and later—later— _later_ —he pushes three of his fingers into the velvet-wet clutch of her cunt and it’s her rasping panting _moan_ that slices through the thickly suffocating mist swirling around the ivory marble walls of the penthouse shower and there’s mascara dripping in caviar-black rivulets down the petal-soft curve of her cheek and her breasts are being crushed against his chest with every stabbing flick of his wrist and every helpless rocking roll of her hips and he’s barely kissed her and she’s barely _let_ him but she isn’t his and she’s never going to be his and he thinks ferociously that he doesn’t actually _want her_ he can’t possibly because she’s reckless and she’s dramatic and she’s beaming bubbly bright bright _bright_ effervescence and she’s blinding she’s deafening she’s—

She’s beautiful when she comes.

 

* * *

 

He’s filming a sidebar for the fifth team challenge—a three-course tasting menu inspired by a series of paintings at MoMA that make Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers look fucking _subtle_ in comparison—when a producer asks him why he’s _there_ , why he’s competing at all, and Draco stalls and slouches and stares at the steadily pulsing electric red light perched on top of the camera and it reminds him of a sniper rifle’s wavering deadly laser beam in the _Mission: Impossible_ movies and he waits waits waits for the wrench-click- _boom_ of a bullet sinking into his skull but it never happens and then the producer is changing the subject with an awkward segue of, _‘So, your partner, Rose Weasley, had some interesting things to say about your relationship—care to elaborate?’_ and Draco freezes fumbles _fucks up_ —

Because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he doesn’t know what he _did_ and he doesn’t get it he never got it he has a son in college on the Upper West Side who has his number saved in his iPhone as ‘Daddy Warbucks’ and an ex-wife who fucked off to an artists’ retreat in rural goddamn _Maine_ with her latest age-appropriate girlfriend and Draco doesn’t know what happened he doesn’t know what he _did_ and this bullshit friends-with-benefits _arrangement_ with Rose just feels like a jet-fueled Chutes  & Ladders extension of every single one of his past mistakes and it’s scary screeching scrawling madness because— _because_ —

 _‘Interesting’s definitely the word for it,’_ he answers, boneless and numb and so, so _tired_.

 

* * *

 

The thing is, he remembers her parents.

He’d gone to _culinary school_ with her parents.

He’d been slapped by her mother for getting the pastry director fired and he’d been pummeled by her father for calling his family’s backwoods Brooklyn deli _‘one step up from Subway’_ and a sick sort of fascinated, fatalistic _dread_ takes root in the pit of his stomach whenever he thinks about how they’re going to react to their only daughter kissing his cheek and biting her lip and twirling her hair and flirting with him so outrageously that _Parvati Patil_ notices and raises her eyebrows and blithely refers to them as _‘this season’s power couple, apparently,’_ with a mocking glance in his direction and it’s—it’s enough.

It’s _enough_.

Rose is twenty-one years old.

She leaps into his arms and wraps her legs around his waist after they win the ninth challenge—outdoor savory campfire cooking with jars of _marshmallow fluff_ , Christ—and she picks fights with him about how he organizes his prep station and she insists on using cast-iron skillets for fucking _everything_ and she drops enough gleeful, trembling hints about how _mad_ her mother had been when she’d told her she was going on the show that he begins to understand why she’d slipped into his bed after his last roommate had been eliminated and basically never left.

He hates that he understands.

He _hates_ it.

 

* * *

 

His cock is in her mouth and his fingers are threaded through her hair and the muscles in his abdomen are twitching with the effort not to move and thrust and go after the slurping suction _vice_ of her tonsils fluttering and her throat _rippling_ and he curls his toes and she makes this saliva-slick choking sound that’s airy with desperation and digs her nails into his hips to urge him forward and faster and his brain goes hazy and his thoughts switch frequency with an abrupt high-pitched whine of static and he _comes_ he comes he comes on a stuttering gasping exhale that feels like a punch and a prayer and he collapses backwards onto his bed and she climbs right onto his lap like she fucking _belongs_ there and she might—she might—she _does—_ and he’s talking he’s speaking he’s swearing, _‘I’m not good for you,’_ and it’s a mess it’s all such a fucking mess and he thinks she looks _scared_ when she tightens her grip on his shoulders and—

 _‘My favorite food is pizza,’_ she says, quiet and imploring and surprisingly serious. ‘ _Do you really think I care about what’s good for me?’_

 

* * *

 

In the thirteenth challenge, he sabotages their dinner service for a delegation of famous Japanese sushi chefs by burning all the bacon for their Brussel sprouts. He cites ‘ _cracking under pressure’_ and _‘losing focus in the heat of the moment’_ as his reasons for making such an amateur mistake and Parvati Patil sadly tells him to pack up his knives at the end of the episode and it’s precisely what he anticipated and planned for and _wanted_.

Except Rose—

Rose ignores the script.

She doesn’t cry and she doesn’t crumple and she doesn’t hug him like she thinks the world is on the seesaw barbed wire cusp of an apocalypse and it _unsettles him_ how calm and fierce and determined her expression is as she meets his eyes and cups his face with her hands and murmurs, _‘I’m going to win for you,’_ because—

 _‘No,’_ he corrects her, allowing himself one brief lingering press of his palm to the small of her back, ‘ _you’re going to win for **you**.’_

Her smile is breathtaking.

His mouth goes dry.

He wonders when, exactly, he’d figured out how to say that.

 

* * *

 

She shows up at his brownstone two weeks after winning _Pantry Wars_ and she’s a stranger.

Her makeup is all spun-sugar delicate and shimmering pastel pink and her vibrant copper hair is neatly braided and tied with a prim navy ribbon and hanging between her shoulder blades and she’s chewing on her lower lip and she’s fidgeting with the porcelain buttons on her white lace cardigan and she isn’t Rose, no, not as he knows her— _had known_ her—she isn’t brash and bold and a walking, _waking_ dream—

 _‘I was so tired of being who they expected me to be,’_ she says, plaintive and gentle. _‘It’s why I wanted you. I knew my mom would see me with you on TV and she’d be furious…’_

 _‘And now?’_ he interrupts because he has to know and he has to hear her say it and the tick-tock pounding thump of his heartbeat is loud like the howling din of midtown traffic before it fades into the background and fades into _nothing_ —

 _‘And now I just…want you,’_ she whispers, like she’s confiding a secret. _‘I didn’t realize there was a difference. Between wanting you for **something** and wanting you for **you**. Not until you were already gone.’_

 

* * *

 

He walks into the Weasley family’s humble home-style sandwich shop— _The Burrow_ , Jesus fucking _Christ_ —with his fingers laced through Rose’s and an admittedly pretty smug grin stretched across his face and there’s the faintest fizzle-pop-roar of anxiety and fear and _excitement_ frothing at the base of his spine like a shaken-up can of Coke but it’s okay, it’s _okay_ —he likesit.

 _‘Ready?’_ Rose asks, peeking up at him through her lashes as she squeezes his hand.

He likes _her_.

 _‘Yeah, I’m ready,’_ he replies and the words taste like lightning in a bottle and four shots of expensive Italian espresso and he wants to savor the shockwave-sweet intensity of the moment and the feeling and the _honesty_ because—

It tastes good.

It tastes like a beginning.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
